I'm a new customer and RTP31P2 just arrived. I run 3 different subnets at home to help isolate work boxes, adults, kids/guests. For when I work from home, I depend on my VPN tunnel into the office. So... I was thinking I'd hook up the RTP31P2 behind my other routers so as to not disrupt my current setup (Linksys had known problems with my VPN and DynDNS thus why I initially went negear before all this Voip stuff and had a background concern this new stuff might mess up the works). However, I was thinking I'd have to open up some router ports (I try to have everything inbound blocked but a couple of non standard ports forwarded to a specific server for those times when I have to tunnel back to home). But I just plugged in the Linksys Wan into a free Lan port in my Netgear environment and got a dial tone and made a call. Soooo... now I'm confused as I thought I read somewhere about having to open up ports 5060-5061 and 10000-20000. I thought I had UPnP disabled as well as my ports stealth'd or blocked. So are my existing firewalls faulty? or does this thing fully function making all outbound connections only? What might I be missing by not opening up ports? (I'm aware of other issues such as possible Qos issues with other competing home network traffic, but any thing else come to mind specifically with ports?)

Its working ... even if I plug the RT31P2 wan out into a wireless bridge back to one of my wireless routers. Almost amazing.

I too have a RT31P2 and have tested it with the ports forwarded and unforwarded. I have not seen any difference. It seems to always keep a connection to Vonage going on port 10000 when idle. I assume for incoming call notification, line configuration, among other things. When a call is in progress it opens more connections in the 10000-20000 port range. All the connections seem to originate from the Linksys router however, so it doesn't seem like it needs port forwarding on. It just seems to need the ability for outgoing traffic on those ports.

Of course without the tftp port 69 forwarded you may not receive any firmware updates. I haven't been able to confirm that however.

Thanks for your experiences. I noticed the first time connection took it a long time to come up compared to subsequent power off cold boots, so perhaps it was doing a firmware update then. Maybe it does originate everything it needs and I can keep firewall(s) closed. At least that is the way I'm going to continue to run for a while.

At idle, I'm observing an ip packet being transmitted once every 20 seconds. I guess I might break out the sniffer when I get real curious.